Memoirists From Italy

"If he believes time has run its course, A man is a sad thing too."

"Stand back, leave me alone, submerged people, Go away. I haven't dispossessed anyone, Haven't usurped anyone's bread. No one died in my place. No one. Go back into your mist. It's not my fault if I live and breathe, Eat, drink, sleep and put on clothes."

"Consider whether this is a man, Who labours in the mud Who knows no peace Who fights for a crust of bread Who dies at a yes or a no."

"Consider that this has been: I commend these words to you. Engrave them on your hearts When you are in your house, when you walk on your way, When you go to bed, when you rise. Repeat them to your children. Or may your house crumble, Disease render you powerless, Your offspring avert their faces from you."

"The future of humanity is uncertain, even in the most prosperous countries, and the quality of life deteriorates; and yet I believe that what is being discovered about the infinitely large and infinitely small is sufficient to absolve this end of the century and millennium. What a very few are acquiring in knowledge of the physical world will perhaps cause this period not to be judged as a pure return of barbarism."

"To be considered stupid and to be told so is more painful than being called gluttonous, mendacious, violent, lascivious, lazy, cowardly: every weakness, every vice, has found its defenders, its rhetoric, its ennoblement and exaltation, but stupidity hasn’t."

"It is not at all an idle matter trying to define what a human being is."

"It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere."

"It is the duty of righteous men to make war on all undeserved privilege, but one must not forget that this is a war without end."

"The aims of life are the best defense against death."

"It was not possible for us nor did we want to become islands; the just (i giusti) among us, neither more nor less numerous than in any other human group, felt remorse, shame and pain for the misdeeds that others and not they had committed, and in which they felt involved, because they sensed that what had happened around them and in their presence, and in them, was irrevocable. Never again could it be cleansed; it would prove that man, the human species — we, in short — had the potential to construct an enormity of pain, and that pain is the only force created from nothing, without cost and without effort. It is enough not to see, not to listen, not to act."

"In countries and epochs in which communication is impeded, soon all other liberties wither; discussion dies by inanition, ignorance of the opinion of others becomes rampant, imposed opinions triumph. The well-known example of this is the crazy genetics preached in the USSR by Lysenko, which in the absence of discussion (his opponents were exiled to Siberia) compromised the harvests for twenty years. Intolerance is inclined to censor, and censorship promotes ignorance of the arguments of others and thus intolerance itself: a rigid, vicious circle that is hard to break."

"Except for cases of pathological incapacity, one can and must communicate, and thereby contribute in a useful and easy way to the peace of others and oneself, because silence, the absence of signals, is itself a signal, but an ambiguous one, and ambiguity generates anxiety and suspicion. To say that it is impossible to communicate is false; one always can."

"The prisoners who saved themselves were not the best, the predestined to good, the bearers of a message: what I had seen and experienced showed the exact opposite. Survived the worst of preference, the selfish, the violent, the insensitive, the collaborators of the 'gray area', the spies. It was not a certain rule (there were, nor are there in human affairs, certain rules), but was also a rule. I felt so innocent, but trooped among the saved, and therefore constantly looking for an excuse, before me and the others. Survived the worst, that is the most suitable; the best are all dead."

"There is no proportion between the pity we feel and the extent of the pain by which the pity is aroused: a single Anne Frank excites more emotion than the myriads who suffered as she did but whose image has remained in the shadows. Perhaps it is necessary that it can be so; if we had to and were able to suffer the sufferings of everyone, we could not live."

"La nostra casa è un mucchio di rovine dove abbiam fatto tante cose belle. Sette eravamo. Vuol la nostra fine l'amor che muove il sole e l'altre stelle"

"From the works of Primo Levi to the recipes of imagined foods found in the concentration camps of Terezin to the brave poetry of Anna Akhmatova written during the Stalinist era, we are forced to acknowledge the power of poetry to name the unspeakable-to enter and to illuminate the secret corridor of horrors."

"Exposed or isolated, deprived of our culture or locked into it, our powerlessness to define ourselves culminates in the camps: take Primo Levi, a chemist, deported from Italy to Auschwitz in 1943, one of millions: "Levi's number-174517-was tattooed on his left arm in a swift and slightly painful operation.... Only by showing the number could 174517 get bread and soup. Levi speaks: Nothing belongs to us anymore; they have taken/away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we/speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen,/they will not understand. They will even take away/our name: and if we want to keep it, we will have to/find in ourselves the strength to do so, to manage/somehow so that behind the name something of us/of us as we were, still remains."

"His death was a terrible blow for all of us. We never thought he would kill himself. He was a kind of reference point for us, a model of great serenity and balance. After he killed himself I realized that of course the memory of the camps can never be effaced in any survivor. So many of our great witnesses to that horror have committed suicide. But for every suicide there are always undoubtedly countless factors which must be appreciated. These are never simple matters. But I’m sure that the memory of the camps makes it impossible for one to completely accept life afterwards. And yet he was a person, as I remember him, who was extremely serene and ironic. In the end, though, the torment of his experience in the camps was intolerable. (PB: Would you say that in Italy he was chiefly appreciated for his writings on the holocaust?) NG: No, not only for those, but in general. He was recognized as an extremely important figure. He hated the word ‘holocaust’, though, and so do I. In Italian, at least, it has the distinct effect of ennobling something which cannot be ennobled. I feel “genocide” is a better, more accurately descriptive word. But, yes, he was recognized and respected in every imaginable sense."

"His books were important to me. I miss his presence in the world."

"no listing of Italian Sephardic authors would be complete without Primo Levi, who, along with Elie Wiesel, Imre Kertész, Paul Celan, and Aharon Appelfeld, is one of the most acclaimed chroniclers of the Holocaust. A chemist born into a secular, assimilated family in Turin, Levi is best known for If This Is a Man, a straightforward but at the same time heartrending chronicle of his years as a prisoner in Auschwitz, to which he was deported in 1943. When the autobiography was first published in Italian in 1947, it received almost no attention, perhaps because it was too soon after the Holocaust for readers to fully comprehend what had just occurred. But upon its reissue in 1958 under the title Survival in Auschwitz, the volume quickly became recognized as a classic of Holocaust literature."

"The Italian Jew Primo Levi recognized his kinship with Dante, who likewise wrote of a descent into hell, but having come upon Yiddish speakers for the first time in Auschwitz, he later questioned his authority as a witness and tried to write a novel about the "real Jews" of the Holocaust, the Yiddish Jews of Eastern Europe."

"Interviewer: Is it possible to abolish man's humanity? Levi: Unfortunately, yes. Unfortunately, yes; and that is really the characteristic of the Nazi lager [concentration camp]. About the others, I don't know, because I don't know them; perhaps in Russia the same thing happens. It's to abolish man's personality, inside and outside: not only of the prisoner, but also of the jailer. He too lost his personality in the lager. These are two different itineraries, but with the same result, and I would say that only a few had the good fortune of remaining aware during their imprisonment; some regained their awareness of the experience later, but during it, they had lost it; many forgot everything. They did not record their experiences in their mind. They didn't impress on their memory track. Thus it happened to all, a profound modification in their personality. Most of all, our sensibility lost sharpness, so that the memories of our home had fallen into second place; the memory of family had fallen into second place in face of urgent needs, of hunger, of the necessity to protect oneself against cold, beatings, fatigue... all of this brought about some reactions which we could call animal-like; we were like work animals. It is curious how this animal-like condition would repeat itself in language: in German there are two words for eating. One is essen and it refers to people, and the other is fressen, referring to animals. We say a horse frisst, for example, or a cat. In the lager, without anyone having decided that it should be so, the verb for eating was fressen. As if the perception of the animalesque regression was clear to all."

"[T]hey who do not love [life] do not deserve it."

"[T]hose who do not love [life] are unworthy of it."

"[W]e avenge intelligence when we deceive a fool, and the victory is worth the trouble[.]"

"We avenge intellect when we dupe a fool, and it is a victory not to be despised[.]"

"Whether happy or unhappy, life is the only treasure man possesses[.]"

"Happy or unhappy, life is the only treasure which man possesses[.]"

"[H]appy or miserable, life is the only blessing which man possesses[.]"

"When a sonnet is mediocre it is bad, for it should be sublime."

"This extremely interesting girl, after giving me a single glance from her beautiful eyes, stubbornly refused to look at me again. My vanity at once made me think that it was only so that I would be at full liberty to study her impeccable beauty. It was on this girl that I instantly set my sights, as if all Europe were only a seraglio provided for my pleasures."

"Even if astrology had been a real science, I knew nothing about it. We find countless events in real history which would never have occurred if they had not been predicted. This is because we are the authors of our so-called destiny, and all the 'antecedent necessities' of the Stoics are chimerical; the argument which proves the power of destiny seems strong only because it is sophistical. Cicero laughed at it. Someone whom he had invited to dinner, who had promised to go, and who had not appeared, wrote to him that since he had not gone it was evident that he had not been iturus ('going to go'). Cicero answers him: Veni ergo cras, et veni etiamsi venturus non sis ('Then come tomorrow, and come even if you are not going to come'). At this date, when I am conscious that I rely entirely on my common sense, I owe this explanation to my reader, despite the axiom, Fata viam inveniunt ('Destiny finds the way'). If the fatalists are obliged by their own philosophy to consider the concatenation of all events necessary, a parte ante ('a priori'), what remains of man's moral freedom is nothing; and in that case he can neither earn merit nor incur guilt. I cannot in conscience admit that I am a machine."

"If I had married a woman intelligent enough to guide me, to rule me without my feeling that I was ruled, I should have taken good care of my money, I should have had children, and I should not be, as now I am, alone in the world and possessing nothing."

"Since, though I do not repent my amorous exploits, I am far from wanting my example to contribute to the corruption of the fair sex, which deserves our homage for so many reasons, I hope that my observations will foster prudence in fathers and mothers and thus at least deserve their esteem."

"Things have come to such a point in good society that, if you want to be polite, you can no longer ask a man from what country he comes, for if he is a Norman or a Calabrian he has, when he tells you so, to beg your pardon, or, if he is from the Pays de Vaud, to say he is Swiss. Nor will you ask a nobleman what his arms are, for if he does not know the jargon of heraldry you will embarrass him. You must not compliment a gentleman on his fine hair, for if it is a wig, he may think you are mocking him, nor praise a man or a woman on their fine teeth, for they may be false."

"I loved, I was loved, my health was good, I had a great deal of money, and I spent it, I was happy and I confessed it to myself."

"The spirit of rebellion is present in every great city, and the great task of wise government is to keep it dormant, for if it wakes it is a torrent which no dam can hold back."

"The happiest man is the one who knows how to obtain the greatest sum of happiness without ever failing in the discharge of his duties, and the most unhappy is the man who has adopted a profession in which he finds himself constantly under the sad necessity of foreseeing the future."

"Casanova is unsurpassed as the recreator of the daily talking interests of 18thcentury Europe. He ranges from slut to patrician, from closet to cabinet, waterfront to palace. He is superior to all other erotic writers because of his pleasure in news, in gossip, in the whole personality of his mistresses."

"He wrote thousands of pages; the history of more than half a century, drawing on his remarkable memory, as well as on personal notes, letters, biographical fragments, jealously preserved through a lifetime of sudden exits. The result is what Edmund Wilson has rightly called the most interesting memoirs ever written. Indeed, Rousseau, Stendhal, even Augustine, must take their proper place, a half step behind this greatest of storytellers."

"I have always loved truth so passionately that I have often resorted to lying as a way of first introducing it into minds which were ignorant of its charms."

"I saw that everything famous and beautiful in the world, if we judge by the descriptions and drawings of writers and artists, always loses when we go to see it and examine it closely."

"As for myself, I always willingly acknowledge my own self as the principal cause of every good and of every evil which may befall me; therefore I have always found myself capable of being my own pupil, and ready to love my teacher."

"Learn from me that a wise man who has heard a criminal accusation related with so many absurd particulars ceases to be wise when he makes himself the echo of what he has heard, for if the accusation should turn out to be a calumny, he would himself become the accomplice of the slanderer."

"Economy in pleasure is not to my taste."

"Nothing is so catching as the plague; now, fanaticism, no matter of what nature, is only the plague of the human mind."

"One of the advantages of a great sorrow is that nothing else seems painful."

"Should anyone bring against me an accusation of sensuality he would be wrong, for all the fierceness of my senses never caused me to neglect any of my duties."

"The man who forgets does not forgive, he only loses the remembrance of the harm inflicted on him; forgiveness is the offspring of a feeling of heroism, of a noble heart, of a generous mind, whilst forgetfulness is only the result of a weak memory, or of an easy carelessness, and still oftener of a natural desire for calm and quietness. Hatred, in the course of time, kills the unhappy wretch who delights in nursing it in his bosom."